Equipment Loans Give Students Practice With Key Biotech Tools

Science departments seek high-tech instruments, promising companies a generation of skilled researchers in return. WASHINGTON--This spring two dozen students at North Carolina State University are mastering protein chemistry in the classroom with equipment usually found only in a state-of-the-art research laboratory. And the university didn't have to buy a single instrument. The reason? The new head of the biochemistry department, Paul Agris, convinced companies to loan or donate $500,000 in equipment for a new instrument training program. The equipment allows graduate and undergraduate students to purify, characterize, and sequence proteins and to synthesize DNA. Agris made his pitch to salesmen for whom his department had been a good customer. And he cruised trade show exhibits looking for possible donors. Agris took on the challenge of finding donors because the high cost of such state-of-the-art equipment was beyond the reach of his budgets. And biotechnology companies responded to his entreaties because of their need for a trained work force and the advantages of having a higher profile on campus. Agris is certainly not alone in his hunt for industrial partners, but he has probably been more successful at getting what his students need. This week at the 41st annual Pittsburgh Conference in New York City, other eager faculty may be looking to the more than 800 exhibitors for help in stocking their labs and classrooms with high-tech equipment. "There's never been anything formal done to get professors and students together with manufacturers," says Ann Cibulas, president of this year's conference, "but there is a need for training to occur at all levels." The Society of Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh and the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh, which sponsor the meeting, do not formally encourage links between corporations and academia, she adds, but they would consider proposals for talks or workshops about such links. For now, faculty seem to do best by working from the local level up, say conference organizers. Large companies like Hewlett-Packard Co. offer instrumentation grants. But to get help from smaller companies, the pitch needs to be more personal. That personal touch was Agris's strong point. He turned out to have hidden talent as a salesman. In the past, Gilson Inc., an instruments manufacturer in Middleton, Wis., had lent out equipment long-term only when a scientist was using it to develop a new technique that would also benefit the firm. But this year it agreed to donate a $25,000 high performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC) without such a quid pro quo, says Lon Alterman of Thomson Instrument Co., a sales organization that represents Gilson in North Carolina. "We're just tremendously pleased with Paul's entrepreneurial spirit to get something done," says Alterman. "I think that his spirit is something that we need to see more of in academia." Industry also needs more academics like Agris, note scientists in the field. "Suppliers are in a major bind because there are insufficient people being trained on their machines," says Stephen Dahms, who chaired the education committee for the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Yet, few universities can afford either the precious time in their curricula or the scarce funds in their budgets to purchase modern equipment for students to learn on. "Although states provide money for research purposes in large amounts, they are unwilling to provide funds for teaching high-tech science," says Agris. "It's easier for them to buy, say, 100 microscopes than one protein sequencer." And that's true not just in North Carolina. Dahms, who directs the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology (CSUPERB) in San Diego, is pulling together a multimillion-dollar instrument resource center for a 20-campus consortium. "There's no way I'm going to turn these [machines] over to a group of undergraduates," he says. Most chemistry curricula teach students about analytical instruments, such as mass spectrometers and nuclear magnetic resonance imagers. Biochemistry students learn about centrifuges, spectrophotometers, and scintillation counters. But they get little exposure to such newer and more expensive equipment as HPLCs or DNA or peptide synthesizers. Agris hopes to change that. "We provide companies with what now is a void of people with expertise," says Agris. Most of the time this expertise is learned on the job, he says, but "there's no reason why we shouldn't be attempting to teach it in the educational years." Companies couldn't agree more. "If we don't have to do on-the-job training, we'd prefer that," says a spokesman for Amgen, a California biotechnology company. Most of Amgen's employees already have Ph.D.'s and, thus, some experience doing research on the latest equipment. But in the future, according to a 1988 report by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, companies such as Amgen will be hiring increasing numbers of technicians. "Lots of what people learn on, especially on the undergraduate level, are technologies that were used 20 years ago," says Julie Perrine, product group manager for Pharmacia LKB in Piscataway, N.J., which donated $100,000 in equipment. "I think it's very useful to give them experience in working with the newest technology. The focus can be on the teaching, not on the instrumentation. Then when these people go into labs in industry, they will be more up to date with techniques." In return, companies benefit from some objective views of their equipment. "What we will really get from this, in the long run, are some critical comments from someone who doesn't have an investment to protect," says Alterman. After spending thousands of dollars on an instrument, a scientist may be unwilling to admit it may be flawed. But Agris's group, he says, "can say what they want. It allows us to learn along with the investigators." The donation also gives Gilson a de facto demonstration site for its products. Agris may have had more than simply salesmanship on his side. He was also in the right place, in a region bursting with biotechnology companies. "It [the program] can go a long way to help the local economy," says Robert Diller, vice president of marketing for Brinkman Instruments in Westbury, N.Y., about the program's impact on Research Triangle Park. Nearly one half of the 50 biochemistry majors from Agris's department each year go to work for industry, and many of them stay in the area. "One key to our success is that the local sales reps recognized what it could mean for them locally," says Agris. "They know there are a lot of potential users." As Douglas Steinman, senior salesman for Canberra-Packard, a Connecticut firm that supplied a $17,000 liquid scintillation counter, observes, "we'd like future scientists to be trained in our equipment." Specialized training in biotechnology seems to pay off for a region. Since 1980, the In Vitro Cell Biology and Biotechnology Program at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh/W.H. Miner Research Institute has turned out 197 biotechnologists who are hotly pursued by companies, notes William Graziadei, the program's director. Each semester 18 students intensively study tissue culture and cellular and molecular biology. One quarter will go on to graduate school, while the rest go to work. About 85% stay in New York State. Each year Graziadei solicits support from about 60 biotechnology companies. Included in his letter is a wish list of equipment. Graziadei says he fills about half his needs through donations, but adds that he never asks for anything worth more than $10,000. Agris has been much bolder. He has acquired six HPLC setups, valued at about $30,000 each. Each station also includes about $2,500 in gel electrophoresis equipment. There are three gel densitometers, two worth $10,000 and one worth $25,000. DNA synthesizers cost about $40,000; scintillation counters are worth about $17,000. Any day now he is expecting a protein sequencer, valued at about $80,000. "If they've got a sequencer, that's a tremendous advantage," says Gra-ziadei. "There is a need for people to run sequencers." In more mature industries, such as semiconductor manufacturing, companies often donate surplus equipment to universities when they purchase newer models. But most biotechnology companies are too young to have experienced that turnover. "Most of our instruments are less than five years old," says Wallace McKeehan, senior scientist at the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center Inc. in Plattsburgh, N.Y. "And we anticipate that the instruments will last 10 years." At the same time, the rapid growth within the biotechnology field creates some opportunities. Amgen has just moved into a new building, says its spokesman, and company officials plan to make some donations after taking inventory. In the meantime, there are other institutions seeking to prepare the next generation of biotechnologists. About a dozen universities offer certificate programs, in which students spend an extra year learning biotechnology after they get their bachelor's degrees, says Dahms. Applied Biosystems in California has set up its own training program. There are also workshops for which companies provide equipment on loan. For example, Pharmacia supplies liquid chromatograph and electrophoresis work stations for workshops run by Catholic and Georgetown universities in Washington, D.C., and Cold Spring Harbor (N.Y.) Laboratory, "but this is the first time we've been involved with something permanent," says Perrine. NCSU students may also benefit from Agris's being an early bird. As similar programs proliferate, companies will have to become more discriminating about where they can provide support. "We aren't equipped to handle every situation," says Perrine. "It's become a matter for us of rating [the program]. N.C. State is the only one we're involved with on such a scale."

Equipment Loans Give Students Practice With Key Biotech Tools

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